Is there any more to CEEI than a website and a dubious claim to be the regional partners of Europe's leading manufacturer of spent nuclear fuel casks?

Judging by its website, the only real asset of CEEI, the Cypriot-registered firm specialising in the planning and construction of storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel casks, would seem to be its partnership with Europe’s leading producer of such casks, the Essen-based Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service or GNS.

I say specialising in storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel casks but according to its website, CEEI's only actual project is with ČEZ and that was awarded four years ago. To remind readers, ČEZ announced in May 2008 that it had selected CEEI to build its temporary storage facility at NPP Temelín. CEEI got the job in exchange for 1.5bn kč. ČEZ’s estimate of the value of the contract published in the Notice of Contract Award was 400m kč.

Websites can be very misleading and in the case of CEEI, it is hard to understand why GNS would want to partner with a company like CEEI. As I have repeatedly pointed out in earlier blogs (see The Appian Loop), CEEI’s real owners are hidden behind shell companies registered first in Liechtenstein and now in Cyprus, and its manager and board directors are former and current Czech politicians associated with ODS. As far as I know, the firm had no track record in the business at the time of the award of the ČEZ contract.

And yet all three companies appear to want the outside world to believe that CEEI and GNS are partners. If there is no cooperation between GNS and CEEI, why would GNS continue to allow CEEI publicly to claim that it enjoys a regional partnership with the German firm? Certainly ČEZ would like us to think that CEEI was awarded the NPP Temelín contract because of its privileged relationship with GNS. ČEZ’s spokeswoman maintains that CEEI is GNS’s regional partner outside Germany and holds an exclusive licence with the German cask manufacturer in the Czech Republic. ČEZ's justification for picking CEEI as the general contractor for the facility, at least according to its spokeswoman, appears then to be this: ČEZ selected Castor casks supplied directly from GNS, and because CEEI held an exclusive licence with GNS in the Czech Republic, it was the obvious choice as the general supplier of the facility in which GNS’s casks were to be placed.

If this were true, it might explain why CEEI was the only firm to bid in the tender. But is it true? Can it really be the case that ČEZ’s hands were somehow tied, and that it was obliged to select CEEI once having selected GNS? Or could it be that CEEI's relationship with GNS is not as special as we are being asked to believe by ČEZ? Could it be that CEEI never actually held a licence, exclusive or otherwise, on a GNS design of such a storage facility, and that ČEZ's spokeswoman has been misleading journalists with her claims about CEEI’s exclusive regional partnership with GNS and its subsidiaries?

Readers might be forgiven for suspecting that GNS was encouraged to form a partnership with CEEI by the management of ČEZ itself, who felt the need to lend plausibility to a decision to select such an implausible (though politically well-connected) company as CEEI. But did it actually form such a partnership and was it in fact exclusive? And if not, what was the reason for selecting CEEI?